Research: Is There Another Way To Lift Student Achievement?
From Forbes.com
For over two decades, a big standardized test has been used to measure student achievement. It’s not a particularly useful measurement.
While there is ample evidence of correlation between test scores and life outcomes, correlation is not causation. There’s still a huge gap in research around the test; we are still missing evidence that changing a student’s test score will change the student’s life outcome.
There is ample research to suggest that the big standardized test actually measures, as researcher Christoper Tienken put it, “the family and community capital of the student.” Tienken has repeatedly shown that he can use a demographic profile of a community to predict a school’s test scores.
In short, while some education reformers have insisted that raising test scores would raise income and job success, the research suggests they might have that exactly backwards. But perhaps there is yet another answer.
A new paper seeks to break down more precisely what factors go hand in hand with achievement, what opportunity gaps drive the achievement gaps between children of poverty and children of affluence.
The paper has the very unsexy title “Accumulation of Opportunities Predicts the Educational Attainment and Adulthood Earnings of Children Born Into Low- Versus Higher-Income Households” and was written by Eric Dearing (Boston College), Andre S. Bustamante (University of California, Irvine), Henrik Zachrisson (University of Oslo), and Deborah Lowe Vandell (University of California, Irvine).